Program Curriculum

The Pasadena City College Child Development Center will provide each child with a strong development based education to facilitate learning. In September, 1999 the California Department of Education defined Development Based Education as: “The result of educators making decisions about the learning and well being of children according to at least four kinds of knowledge. They are:

Human development and learning:

An understanding of the developmental changes in children’s growth and learning that typically occur during the years from birth through age eight and beyond.

Individual Characteristics and experiences:

A realization that variations in development may occur, according to a child’s strengths, interests, needs, and experiences.

Social and cultural contexts:

A cognizance of the best ways in which to support children’s learning and development during these years so that education, while building on children’s social and cultural backgrounds, is safe, challenging, and achievable.

Standards or learning expectations:

An understanding of the continuum of grade-level standards or learning expectations and appropriate teaching strategies that lead to children’s success.

Development-based education relies on a set of principals that are summary statements about how children develop and learn physically, emotionally, socially, and cognitively. Development-based education is not a cookie-cutter, lockstep program because it is neither a curriculum nor an exact prescription with hard and fast rules about particular children or situations. Professional early childhood educators use the principles of development-based education to examine materials, practices, and the environments to plan a program that maximizes children’s academic, physical, social, and emotional development.”

With the information organized based on this knowledge about children and child development, the Pasadena City College Child Development Center further looks at meeting our program’s goals by utilizing the theories of John Dewey, Erik Erikson, Howard Gardner, Magda Gerber, Lev Vygotssky, Jean Piaget, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, as well as others, to guide our journey.back to top